Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 215

Design & punish: A review of Prison Architect

To punish less, but to punish better.

Metal Gear Online glitches result in a beautiful papery garden

As an escape from its arid deserts and flustered robot politics, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain offers Mother Base—an offshore plant near the Seychelles, a place to chill out between missions, where you can overlook the surrounding view of the ocean blue. Even so, it is still made of refined steel and filled up with saluting soldiers calling your name; hardly a proper retreat from the battlefield.

What you might want instead is somewhere populated by paper trees and where shrubs and bushes are cut out from rigid stencils. Think of something resembling the material world of Tearaway: inviting you to scribble on its colorless shapes, to put aside your assault rifle and frolic through an overgrown garden to experience only wonder. Now that would be a true vacation.

put aside your assault rifle and frolic 

That's exactly what Konami delivered today with the launch of Metal Gear Online for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an accident. Glitches to be more precise. And so the textureless, papery environment that Cee Thomas discovered when booting the game up today was only temporary. Fortunately, he captured it in a few screenshots, as you can see above and below.

Thomas shared the glitchscape in a private Facebook group but these images are too good not to share. They resemble artist Kim Laughton's view of Grand Theft Auto V, in which she stripped the game of its textures so that Los Santos resembled a smog-filled husk of a city. Here, in Metal Gear Online, these glitches remove the austerity and lifelike qualities of the game's open world hub area in favor of a more fantastical space. It makes the player character feel small, as if they've been shrunk down to a minute size, the trees like blades of grass in someone's back yard. Yes, it looks like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

Image credit: Cee Thomas

Where does VR go from here? A discussion

Let’s say you believe that virtual reality is the future of artistic expression. Don’t laugh; this belief is sincerely held by plenty of people. So, let’s say so you believe that VR is the future, how on Earth do you start to build towards that future?

This was the evening’s main question when the travelling Kaleidoscope VR Film Festival stopped in Toronto on Sunday. While the event is unquestionably optimistic in its view of VR, it does not take the medium’s eventual dominance for granted. Indeed, one of its main purposes is to encourage artists and developers to start making VR projects, which leads back to the initial question of how, exactly, one might go about doing that.

To that end, Ryot’s Tyson Sadler, Last Mountain director Avram Dodson, and I Am You director Elli Raynai were all asked to talk about what they learned while working with VR. The first caveat in any such discussion is that nobody really knows all that much—at least not yet. VR, as a new technology, has high barriers to entry (have you looked up the cost of a headset—let alone a camera rig—lately?) and consequently relatively low thresholds for expertise. Ryot, for instance, has been making advocacy documentaries for the last five years but only truly branched out into VR five months ago. The studio is currently working on its 25th VR project. Five months is a short eternity in VR terms. Likewise, Dodson points out that after making one VR film, he now appears on expert panels. This wouldn’t necessarily happen in other fields, but it speaks to the current state of VR.

A good visual story...should not make you puke. 

At this early stage, everyone is starting from scratch, which is not necessarily the optimal use of artists’ time and effort. “It’s hard to get access to this stuff so we’re all try to figure out how to do this first,” says Dodson, who tested camera movements over and over until he had figured out which ones did and did not cause nausea. Similarly, Raynai built a test rig to understand the consequence of camera movements in VR. “Our goal is to move the camera,” he said, but achieving that goal without negative externalities remains a challenge. Indeed, the fact that most of the panel had conducted variants of the same experiments speaks to the need for—and importance of—diffusing VR knowledge.

Why do these things matter? In short, VR can be quite sickening. A good visual story requires camera movement, but the differences between camera movement as perceived by your eyes and sensations in your inner ears can cause motion sickness. A good visual story, incidentally, should not make you puke. One solution Raynai identified was nudging the viewer into thinking the camera’s about to pan and then cutting to its end destination, effectively getting them to fill in the blank in their head. This approach of VR sickness, which owes a great deal to the hinting and eliding old-fashioned cinematography, might buy creators enough time to figure out how to make panning work.

All of these experiments, however, bring us back to the initial point about barriers to entry. Raynai says that one of VR’s biggest problems is the lack of accessible and usable software. At present, filmmakers must collaborate with developers, which makes it harder for a lone creative to just play around with the technology and see what happens. There is a further financial barrier to this kind of exploration. It costs thousands of dollars per minute to produce VR films, and the funding mechanisms to cover these costs are still being worked out. “There is money out there if you search around,” Sadler says, yet that knowledge cannot fully assuage concerns about the price of camera rigs, software, and headsets. That the sources of potential funding now include studios as well as sponsors and crowdfunding sites is encouraging, but hardly means that the total pool of funding is large enough to support the work that needs to be done.

Until the day comes where institutional funding is available, the development of VR filmmaking will probably depend on crowds like the one at Kaleidoscope’s festival informally transmitting information. In the short term, this approach to community-building and professional growth is unlikely to produce a glut of remarkable films, but it will lay out the necessary groundwork for figuring out what—if anything—VR is really good for. Sadler, Dodson, and Raynai all agreed that VR is a promising technology that should be put to greater use, now someone has to do just that. 

Any volunteers? 

The how and why of e-lit: a creator speaks to poetry of the digital age

The challenge and value of e-lit.

Verreciel is a minimalist space exploration game set in a glass ship

There’s a graceful fragility to the works of Devine Lu Linvega and his latest game is no exception.

Verreciel, which launches on January 10th, 2016 for iOS, will let you explore “surrounding universes” aboard a vessel called the Glass Ship. There isn’t much info about it beyond that. Its interface is sharp and fine, like glass. Wiry lettering labels its various functions—battery, hull, electricity, thruster. Stars expand beyond its angled windows into long lines the faster you go.

Linvega also describes Verreciel as a “linguistically involved project” like his previous ones, including Paradise, Hiversaires, Oquonie, and Ledoliel.

Follow Verreciel on Twitter and its website.

Super Mario Maker, and the problem of reviewing a community

Nintendo’s community is subverting and reinventing the platformer.

Crossdress as your brother and get beaten as a reward in this game teaser

Christine Love, creator of queer games and cute characters, recently released a teaser for her upcoming game, My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!! Or, for less of a mouthful, Ladykiller in a Bind.

a game about social manipulation. 

The teaser features a Domme coaching the brother of a prince through hypothetical social interactions with plenty of innuendo, a fair share of kissing, and slaps with a riding crop whenever the prince missteps or the Domme feels like it.

Beyond this, Ladykiller in a Bind is a game about social manipulation. As the prince’s brother, players must navigate social situations with people he doesn’t know while pretending to be someone else. The teaser presents players with various responses—friendly, awkward, flirty, and rebellious, among others—to control the way the conversation goes, who kisses who, and how likely the protagonist is to get whacked.

The Ladykiller in a Bind teaser is available on the Love Conquers All Games website.

Shut up, Always Sometimes Monsters

The videogame equivalent of a teenager’s first moustache.

There is now a high tech gadget exclusively for women's health

You know how I know its the future? Because "smart" technology is trying to literally get in my pants.

Let me explain: the Looncup, recently Kickstarted, is a bluetooth-enabled menstrual cup designed to help women "redefine" their "special time of the month." If those words sound like gibberish to you, join the club, because either your first reaction is "what the hell is a menstrual cup?" or "why the hell is the Internet of Things trying to get inside me?"

But beyond these instinctual responses lies something much more important. First of all, technology—that shiny stuff produced in Silicon Valley which is mostly made by men for men—is breaking the menstrual taboo in a significant way. Technology specifically designed for women, let alone their icky periods, hasn't really made an appearance since ancient Egyptian women first thought to use papyrus as a tampon. Periods have been so unmentionable, in fact, that the first time a first period was ever written about in a fictional setting was all the way back to the olden days (meaning the 70s), when Judy Bloom published Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Which is why Looncup is so incredible. Not only does it tell you when you need to change your cup through a mobile app, but it also keeps track of your fluid volume and color, which can often be a huge indicator of women's health. And while I'm not a doctor, I know my doctor has been begging me to keep close track of my cycles since I was first initiated. And I haven't—because, well, life tends to not be very period-friendly.

our cultural relationship to menstruation[...] affects women's health 

To a huge extent, our cultural relationship to menstruation (which, right now, can best be described as tolerated and at worst be described as antagonistic) affects women's health. By sweeping a natural biological function under the rug, we risk losing sight of its significance as an indicator of a person's overall health.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that we've come a long way since my grandmother believed she had contracted a serious disease and was most likely dying after she got her first period.

On the Kickstarter, Looncup uses a lot of liberation verbiage, like the concept that it can give you "back your freedom" to "live happier." While this mostly sounds like marketing bullshit, the Kickstarter also points out that we're in desperate need of revamping the way we think about our periods. Looncup wants to turn your monthly stress-filled, sex-less week into a celebration of the fact that your body is doing what it should be doing. 

At the same time, I'm wary of giving the internet access to the most intimate part of me. What about all those bluetooth-enabled baby monitors that people hacked into only to terrify children (and their parents) half to death? What would happen if someone hacked into another person's Looncup? I shudder to think. 

You can support the creation of Looncup over on Kickstarter.

Creator of Stranded returns with a cyberpunk adventure inspired by Akira

Murder is the name of Peter Moorhead’s upcoming cyberpunk adventure game, which is set to launch on October 21st for desktop and mobile devices. While Moorhead’s previous game Stranded might’ve looked to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 for inspiration, Murder is rooted in the works of cyberpunk masters, including Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell).

"designed and written to reward attentive and thoughtful play" 

Set in Japan of the future, Murder puts you in control of a lieutenant in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. The story is said to revolve around “the intersection of morality and sentience in a future where both have become commodities,” while the environment and structure of the game are designed to break down conventions of the classic point-and-click adventure style.

“Where Stranded scattered its message throughout the world’s canyons and caves, Murder stashes its message behind a firewall of noise and information,” says Moorhead. “It’s designed and written to reward attentive and thoughtful play.”

The end result is yet to be seen, but according to Murder’s website, it’s inspired in part by both Fullbright and Blendo Games, the folks who created Gone Home and Thirty Flights of Loving, respectively. Since Murder is supposed to be a thirty minute game, it makes sense it would pull from similarly short experiences that still contain a lot of intrigue.

Murder features voice acting, art by Lucas “Midio” Carvalho and Glauber Kotaki, a soundtrack by KubrixXx, and sound design from Surasshu, the composer for Steven Universe.

Learn more about Murder on its website.